In the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend
Robby have accidentally unleashed an unstoppable army. An army of horny,
hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises that only want to do two things. This is
the truth. This is history. It's the end of the world. And nobody knows
anything about it.Funny, intense,
complex and brave,Grasshopper
Jungleis a groundbreaking, genre-bending, coming-of-age stunner.

At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the
court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks,
dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that
they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and
discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice.

Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly
dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting,
provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and
her “mid-climacteric” approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny,
and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby –
alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller – believes he
has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he
will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it.

From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the
charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country
on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo
Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of
Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s
black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events,Viper Wineis 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to
find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a
Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.

Lester Ferris, sergeant of the British Army, is a
good man in need of a rest. He’s spent a lot of his life being shot at, and
Afghanistan was the last stop on his road to exhaustion. He has no family, he’s
nearly forty and burned out and about to be retired.

The island of Mancreu is the ideal place for Lester
to serve out his time. It’s a former British colony in legal limbo, soon to be
destroyed because of its very special version of toxic pollution – a
down-at-heel, mildly larcenous backwater. Of course, that also makes Mancreu
perfect for shady business, hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in
the bay: listening stations, offshore hospitals, money laundering operations,
drug factories and deniable torture centres. None of which should be a problem,
because Lester’s brief is to sit tight and turn a blind eye.

But Lester Ferris has made a friend: a brilliant,
Internet-addled street kid with a comicbook fixation who will need a home when
the island dies – who might, Lester hopes, become an adopted son. Now, as
Mancreu’s small society tumbles into violence, the boy needs Lester to be more
than just an observer.

In the name of paternal love, Lester Ferris will
do almost anything. And he’s a soldier with a knack for bad places: “almost
anything” could be a very great deal – even becoming some sort of hero. But
this is Mancreu, and everything here is upside down. Just exactly what sort of
hero will the boy need?

Kentucky
Route Zero is a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway in the
caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it. Gameplay is
inspired by point-and-click adventure games (like the classic Monkey Island or
King's Quest series, or more recently Telltale's Walking Dead series), but
focused on characterization, atmosphere and storytelling rather than clever
puzzles or challenges of skill.

The
game is developed by Cardboard Computer (Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy). The
game's soundtrack features an original electronic score by Ben Babbitt along
with a suite of old hymns & bluegrass standards recorded by The Bedquilt
Ramblers.